Editor’s note: On Friday, NPR reported that the deadly swine flu “combines genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way researchers have not seen before,” thus leading us to suspect it was cooked up in a lab.

Swine flu panic is spreading in Mexico and soldiers are patrolling the streets after it was confirmed that human to human transmission is occurring and that the virus is a brand new strain which is seemingly affecting young, healthy people the worst. Questions about the source of the outbreak are also being asked after a public health official said that the virus was “cultured in a laboratory”.

“This strain of swine influenza that’s been cultured in a laboratoryis something that’s not been seen anywhere actually in the United States and the world, so this is actually a new strain of influenza that’s been identified,” said Dr. John Carlo, Dallas Co. Medical Director (video clip here).

Was this a slip-up or an admission that this new super-strain of swine influenza was deliberately cultured in a laboratory and released?

Alarming reports are now filtering in about people catching the illness who have had no contact with pigs whatsoever. These include a man and his daughter in San Diego County, a 41-year-old woman in Imperial County and two teenagers in San Antonio, Texas. In fact, in all U.S. cases, the victims had no contact with any pigs.

Dr. Wilma Wooten, San Diego County’s public health officer, told KPBS “We have had person-to-person spread with the father and the daughter,” says Wooten, “And also with the two teenagers in Texas, they were in the same school. So that also indicates person-to-person transfer.”

“Dr. Wooten says it’s unclear how people were exposed to swine flu. She says none of the patients have had any contact with pigs,” according to the report.

Although the situation in the U.S. looks under control, panic is spreading in Mexico, where 800 cases of pneumonia in the capital alone are suspected to be related to the swine flu and the virus has hit young and healthy people, which is very rare with an flu outbreak. Despite the danger of a pandemic, the U.S. border with Mexico remains open.

“Mexico has shut schools and museums and canceled hundreds of public events in its sprawling, overcrowded capital of 20 million people to try to prevent further infections,” reports Reuters.

“My level of concern is significant,” said Dr. Martin Fenstersheib, the health officer for Santa Clara County. “We have a novel virus, a brand-new strain that’s spreading human to human, and we are also seeing a virulent strain in Mexico that seems to be related. We certainly have concerns for this escalating.”

The WHO insists that the outbreak has “pandemic potential” and has been stockpiling supplies of Tamiflu, known generically as oseltamivir, a pill that can both treat flu and prevent infection, according to officials.

As we previously highlighted, those that have a stake in the Tamiflu vaccine include top globalists and BIlderberg members like George Shultz, Lodewijk J.R. de Vink and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Indeed, Rumsfeld himself played a key role in hyping an outbreak of swine flu back in the 1976 when he urged the entire country to get vaccinated. Many batches of the vaccine were contaminated, resulting in hundreds of sick people and 52 fatalities.

The fact that the properties of the strain are completely new, that the virus is spreading from people to people, and that the young and healthy are being hit worst, has disturbing parallels to the deadly 1918 pandemic that killed millions.

It is unclear as to why, if the virus is a brand new strain, that public health officials are so confident programs of mass vaccination, which are already being prepared, would necessarily be effective.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that deadly flu viruses have been concocted in labs and then dispatched with the intention of creating a pandemic.

When the story first broke last month, Czech newspapers questioned if the shocking discovery of vaccines contaminated with the deadly avian flu virus which were distributed to 18 countries by the American company Baxter were part of a conspiracy to provoke a pandemic.

Since the probability of mixing a live virus biological weapon with vaccine material by accident is virtually impossible, this leaves no other explanation than that the contamination was a deliberate attempt to weaponize the H5N1 virus to its most potent extreme and distribute it via conventional flu vaccines to the population who would then infect others to a devastating degree as the disease went airborne.

However, this is not the first time that vaccine companies have been caught distributing vaccines contaminated with deadly viruses.

In 2006 it was revealed that Bayer Corporation had discovered that their injection drug, which was used by hemophiliacs, was contaminated with the HIV virus. Internal documents prove that after they positively knew that the drug was contaminated, they took it off the U.S. market only to dump it on the European, Asian and Latin American markets, knowingly exposing thousands, most of them children, to the live HIV virus. Government officials in France went to prison for allowing the drug to be distributed. The documents show that the FDA colluded with Bayer to cover-up the scandal and allowed the deadly drug to be distributed globally. No Bayer executives ever faced arrest or prosecution in the United States.

In the UK, a 2007 outbreak of foot and mouth disease that put Britain on high alert has been originated from a government laboratory which is shared with an American pharmaceutical company, mirroring the deadly outbreak of 2001, which was also deliberately released.

As we reported yesterday, last time there was a significant outbreak of a new form of swine flu in the U.S. it originated at the army base at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

In mathematics, a prime number (or a prime) is a natural numberwhich has exactly two distinct natural number divisors: 1 and itself.

An infinitude of prime numbers exists, as demonstrated by Euclid around 300 BC. The number 1 is by definition not a prime number. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic establishes the central role of primes in number theory: any natural number n can be factored into primes, written as a product of primes or powers of primes. Moreover, this factorization is unique except for a possible reordering of the factors.

The property of being a prime is called primality, and the word prime is also used as an adjective. Verifying the primality of a given number n can be done by trial divisions, that is to say dividing n by all smaller numbers m, thereby checking whether n is a multiple of m, and therefore not prime or composite. For big primes, increasingly sophisticated algorithms which are faster than that technique have been devised.

There is no formula yielding all primes. However, the distribution of primes, that is to say, the statistical behaviour of primes in the large can be modeled. The first result in that direction is the prime number theorem which says that the probability that a given, randomly chosen number n is prime is proportional to its number of digits, or the logarithm of n. This statement has been proved at the end of the 19th century. The unproven Riemann hypothesis dating from 1859 implies a refined statement concerning the distribution of primes.

Despite their being an intensely studied matter, many fundamental questions around prime numbers remain open. For example, Goldbach's conjecture which asserts that any even natural number bigger than two is the sum of two primes, or the twin prime conjecture which says that there are infinitely many twin primes (pairs of primes whose difference is two), have been unresolved for more than a century, notwithstanding the simplicity of their statements.

Prime numbers give rise to various generalizations in other mathematical domains, mainly algebra, notably the notion of prime ideals.

Primes are applied in several routines in information technology, such as public-key cryptography, which makes use of the difficulty of factoring large numbers into their prime factors. Searching for big primes, often using distributed computing, has stimulated studying special types of primes, chiefly Mersenne primes whose primality is comparably quick to decide. As of 2009, the largest known prime has about 12 million decimal digits.

Esotre - Germanic Myth Fertility Goddess of spring as shown with things that come in the spring. Beams of light, animals coming out of hibernation and newborne babes. The painter here, Reich in 1909 is ripping off another painting by Gehrts in 1884 who, found that he didn't want to depict the babies as falling, used Raffaello Sanzios idea for children with wings, also depicted as lesser angels.

Raffaello Sanzio, also known as Raphael, got the nickname from the chief angel Raphael; who, under Uriel, is a healer. Raffaello was perhaps tired of the association thatn all angelic kind got when thought of, and decidedly invented his own.

Concurrently, and not related to ninja turtles at all, Donatello, used them in his works, depicting them as angels on assignment who were primaraly designated to be carrying the bodies of Children to heaven during war-time... He got this idea off of some sarcophagi he saw.

So, in the late 1400's in Italy - We have two examples.

Today, people call them: "Chubby Cherubs". To my knowledge, that is a video-game owned by Bandai, and not an actual being.

What most people think about when they hear the name "Cherub" is these two onlookers in "Sistine Madonna" by Raphael

Raphael and Donatello would probably laugh at you if you called those things Cherubim. Cause EVERYONE knows what THEY look like.

Here is what a Cherub looks like biblically:

Pretty crazy. The prophet Ezekiel describes the cherubim as a gang of living creatures, each having four faces: of a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a man. They are said to have the stature and hands of a man, the feet of a calf, and four wings. Cool!Two of the wings extended upward, meeting above and holding up the throne of Christ; while the other two stretched downward and covered the creatures themselves.

Even Raphael knew this when he painted "Ezekiel"

You can read about examples of these angels in the works of the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel and The Revelation of Saint John of the Apocalypse.

Disturbing arguments from DOJ betray intention to make government immune from any legal challenge over wiretapping

Steve WatsonInfowars.netWednesday, April 8, 2009

Advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has warned that the Obama administration is seeking to expand the government’s authority to carry out wiretapping under the auspices of national security.

The EFF points to the dismissal of its own litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping, warning that arguments made in defense of wiretapping by Obama’s Department of Justice are worse than Bush’s.

EFF writer Tim Jones explains the arguments that were made by the DOJ in the Jewel v. NSA case:

First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.[...]

it’s the Department Of Justice’s second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes. [...]

The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. Essentially, the Obama Administration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes.

The Obama Administration’s full motion to dismiss can be read here (PDF).

In short, not only is the Obama administration actively defending and protecting Bush officials over illegal wiretapping, they are arguing in favor of expanding the practice and already seeking to protect themselves and any other administration past or present from legal challenge.

When dovetailed with recent announcements by Obama’s Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair, that the NSA is seeking to expand it’s power, a clear and disturbing picture emerges.

Blair’s intention to encompass all electronic communications within the NSA’s scope is a direct continuation of the policy under the Bush administration. Last year the former US National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell announced plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a “walk in the park”.

The plan would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search.

This is exactly the kind of thing we warned our readers of before Obama was elected. Instead of repealing the freedom stripping tools put into place by the Bush administration, Obama is continuing to use them and is even seeking to enhance them.

The Associated Press reports that Obama administration is considering radical terra forming programs to stop “global warming,” but universities and government agencies are already doing it, while mass aerosol spraying campaigns have been ongoing for over a decade through the use of chemtrails

Paul Joseph WatsonPrison Planet.comWednesday, April 8, 2009

The Associated Press reports today that the Obama administration has held discussions regarding the possibility of “geo-engineering” the earth’s climate to counter global warming by “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.” However, such programs are already being conducted by government-affiliated universities, government agencies, and on a mass scale through chemtrail spraying.

The AP report states that Obama’s science advisor John Holdren is pushing for radical terra forming programs to be explored such as creating an “artificial volcano”. Despite Holdren’s admission that such measures could have “grave side effects,” he added that, “we might get desperate enough to want to use it.”

“Holdren, a 65-year-old physicist, is far from alone in taking geoengineering more seriously. The National Academy of Science is making climate tinkering the subject of its first workshop in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The British parliament has also discussed the idea,” reports AP.

“The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement on geoengineering that says “it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”

However, a study of past and ongoing upper atmosphere aerosol programs confirms that the government has been active in this field for years.

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program was created in 1989 with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and is sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Science and managed by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research.

One of ARM’s programs, entitled Indirect and Semi-Direct Aerosol Campaign (ISDAC), is aimed at measuring “cloud simulations” and “aerosol retrievals”.

Another program under the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Science Program is directed towards, “developing comprehensive understanding of the atmospheric processes that control the transport, transformation, and fate of energy related trace chemicals and particulate matter.”

The DOE website states that, “The current focus of the program is aerosol radiative forcing of climate: aerosol formation and evolution and aerosol properties that affect direct and indirect influences on climate and climate change.”

U.S. government scientists are already bombarding the skies with the acid-rain causing pollutant sulphur dioxide in an attempt to fight global warming by “geo-engineering” the planet, despite the fact that injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere carries with it a host of both known and unknown dangers.

The proposal to disperse sulphur dioxide in an attempt to reflect sunlight was discussed in a September 2008 London Guardian article entitled, Geoengineering: The radical ideas to combat global warming, in which Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist based at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, promoted the idea of injecting the atmosphere with aerosols.

“One approach is to insert “scatterers” into the stratosphere,” states the article. “Caldeira cites an idea to deploy jumbo jets into the upper atmosphere and deposit clouds of tiny particles there, such as sulphur dioxide. Dispersing around 1m tonnes of sulphur dioxide per year across 10m square kilometres of the atmosphere would be enough to reflect away sufficient amounts of sunlight.”

Experiments similar to Caldeira’s proposal are already being carried out by U.S. government -backed scientists, such as those at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C, who last year began conducting studies which involved shooting huge amounts of particulate matter, in this case “porous-walled glass microspheres,” into the stratosphere.

The project is closely tied to an idea by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who “proposed sending aircraft 747s to dump huge quantities of sulfur particles into the far-reaches of the stratosphere to cool down the atmosphere.”

Such programs merely scratch the surface of what is likely to be a gargantuan and overarching black-budget funded project to geo-engineer the planet, with little or no care for the unknown environmental consequences this could engender.

What is known about what happens when the environment is loaded with sulphur dioxide is bad enough, since the compound is the main component of acid rain, which according to the EPA “Causes acidification of lakes and streams and contributes to the damage of trees at high elevations (for example, red spruce trees above 2,000 feet) and many sensitive forest soils. In addition, acid rain accelerates the decay of building materials and paints, including irreplaceable buildings, statues, and sculptures that are part of our nation’s cultural heritage.”

The health effects of bombarding the skies with sulphur dioxide alone are enough to raise serious questions about whether such programs should even be allowed to proceed.

According to the LennTech website, “Laboratory tests with test animals have indicated that sulfur can cause serious vascular damage in veins of the brains, the heart and the kidneys. These tests have also indicated that certain forms of sulfur can cause foetal damage and congenital effects. Mothers can even carry sulfur poisoning over to their children through mother milk. Finally, sulfur can damage the internal enzyme systems of animals.”

Fred Singer, president of the Science Environmental Policy Project and a skeptic of man-made global warming theories, warns that the consequences of tinkering with the planet’s delicate eco-system could have far-reaching dangers.

“If you do this on a continuous basis, you would depress the ozone layer and cause all kinds of other problems that people would rather avoid,” said Singer.

Even Greenpeace’s chief UK scientist - a staunch advocate of the man-made global warming explanation - Doug Parr has slammed attempts to geo-engineer the planet as “outlandish” and “dangerous”.

Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who recently proposed a bizarre plan to send spaceships into the upper atmosphere that would be used to block out the Sun, admits that geo-engineering could cause “conflicts between nations if geoengineering projects go wrong.”

Given all the immediate dangers associated with bombarding the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide, along with the unknown dangers of other geo-engineering projects, many people are concerned that “chemtrails” are a secret component of the same agenda to alter the Earth’s eco-system.

This graphic proposes, “Spraying aluminum powder and barium oxide into high levels of the atmosphere, again delivered by aircraft, to increase planetary reflectance (albedo) and cloud cover.” High levels of barium have been found in substances associated with chemtrails.

Reports of chemtrails, jet plumes emitted from planes that hang in the air for hours and do not dissipate, often blanketing the sky in criss-cross patterns, have increased dramatically over the last 10 years. Many have speculated that they are part of a government program to alter climate, inoculate humans against certain pathogens, or even to toxify humans as part of a population reduction agenda.

In conducting Google searches, one finds discussion, such as this example, of using sulphur dioxide as a jet fuel additive to be dispersed over the world during routine commercial flights.

“I suggest that both the sulphur dioxide and the silica particles could be delivered into the stratosphere by dissolving an additive in jet aviation fuel,” writes engineer John Gorman, who has conducted experiments to test the feasibility of such a scenario.

“We would want to burn fuel containing the additive specifically when the aircraft was cruising in the lower stratosphere,” he adds.

Earlier this year, KSLA news investigation found that a substance that fell to earth from a high altitude chemtrail contained high levels of Barium (6.8 ppm) and Lead (8.2 ppm) as well as trace amounts of other chemicals including arsenic, chromium, cadmium, selenium and silver. Of these, all but one are metals, some are toxic while several are rarely or never found in nature.

The newscast focuses on Barium, which its research shows is a “hallmark of chemtrails.” KSLA found Barium levels in its samples at 6.8 ppm or “more than six times the toxic level set by the EPA.” The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality confirmed that the high levels of Barium were “very unusual,” but commented that “proving the source was a whole other matter” in its discussion with KSLA.

KSLA also asked Mark Ryan, Director of the Poison Control Center, about the effects of Barium on the human body. Ryan commented that “short term exposure can lead to anything from stomach to chest pains and that long term exposure causes blood pressure problems.” The Poison Control Center further reported that long-term exposure, as with any harmful substance, would contribute to weakening the immune system, which many speculate is the purpose of such man-made chemical trails.

Indeed, barium oxide has cropped up repeatedly as a contaminant from suspected geoengineering experimentation.

KSLA also put aerosolized-chemical testing in its historical context, citing a voluminous number of unclassified tests exposed in 1977 Senate hearings. The tests included experimenting with biochemical compounds on the public. KSLA reports that “239 populated areas were contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969.”

One of the accepted truisms of scientific study is the fact that if scientists are proposing an idea, then those scientists with access to the bottomless pit of black-budget secret government funding are already doing it.

It is highly likely that chemtrails are merely one manifestation of “geo-engineering” that is taking place without proper debate, notification or any form of legality, and with a callous disregard for the potential dangers to both our health and our environment.

look at this picture. do you understand that the slaves are headed FOR the USA?

does this ANGER you? does this mean that former african colonialists were emancipatedand not the modern thai immigrant? what the HELL man? free the people. why is thisnot talked about more? why is it that we are so hush-hush on the whole subject???

The entry sets out five individually necessary conditions for anyone to be a candidate for legalized voluntary euthanasia (or, in some usages, physician-assisted suicide), outlines the moral case advanced by those in favour of legalizing voluntary euthanasia, and discusses five of the more important objections made by those opposed to the legalization of voluntary euthanasia. 1. Introduction2. Five Individually Necessary Conditions for Candidacy for Voluntary Euthanasia3. A Moral Case for Voluntary Euthanasia4. Five Objections to the Moral Permissibility of Voluntary Euthanasia

1. Introduction

When a person carries out an act of euthanasia, he brings about the death of another person because he believes the latter's present existence is so bad that she would be better off dead, or believes that unless he intervenes and ends her life, it will become so bad that she would be better off dead. The motive of the person who commits an act of euthanasia is to benefit the one whose death is brought about. (Though what was just said also holds for many instances of physician-assisted suicide, some wish to restrict the use of the latter term to forms of assistance which stop short of the physician ‘bringing about the death’ of the patient, such as those involving mechanical means that have to be activated by the patient.)

Our concern will be with voluntary euthanasia — that is, with those instances of euthanasia in which a clearly competent person makes a voluntary and enduring request to be helped to die. There will be occasion to mention non-voluntary euthanasia -- instances of euthanasia where a person is either not competent to, or unable to, express a wish about euthanasia and there is no one authorised to make a substituted judgment (in which case a proxy tries to choose as the no-longer-competent patient would have chosen had she remained competent) — in the context of considering the claim that permitting voluntary euthanasia will lead via a slippery slope to permitting non-voluntary euthanasia. Nothing will be said here about involuntary euthanasia, where a competent person's life is brought to an end despite an explicit expression of opposition to euthanasia, beyond saying that, no matter how honourable the perpetrator's motive, such a death is, and ought to be, unlawful.

Debate about the morality and legality of voluntary euthanasia has been, for the most part, a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first century. Certainly, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not believe that life needed to be preserved at any cost and were, in consequence, tolerant of suicide in cases where no relief could be offered to the dying or, in the case of the Stoics and Epicureans, where a person no longer cared for his life. In the sixteenth century, Thomas More, in describing a utopian community, envisaged such a community as one that would facilitate the death of those whose lives had become burdensome as a result of ‘torturing and lingering pain’. But it has only been in the last hundred years that there have been concerted efforts to make legal provision for voluntary euthanasia. Until quite recently, there had been no success in obtaining such legal provision (though assisted suicide has been legally tolerated in Switzerland for many years). However, in the 1970s and 80s a series of court cases in The Netherlands culminated in an agreement between the legal and medical authorities to ensure that no physician would be prosecuted for assisting a patient to die as long as certain guidelines were strictly adhered to (see Griffiths, et al. 1998) In brief, the guidelines were established to permit physicians to practise voluntary euthanasia in those instances in which a competent patient had made a voluntary and informed decision to die, the patient's suffering was unbearable, there was no way of making that suffering bearable that was acceptable to the patient, and the physician's judgements as to diagnosis and prognosis were confirmed after consultation with another physician. In the 1990s, the first legislative approval for voluntary euthanasia was achieved with the passage of a bill in the parliament of Australia's Northern Territory to enable physicians to practise voluntary euthanasia. Subsequent to the Act's proclamation in 1996, it faced a series of legal challenges from opponents of voluntary euthanasia. In 1997 the challenges culminated in the Australian National Parliament overturning the legislation when it prohibited Australian Territories (the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory) from enacting legislation to permit euthanasia. In Oregon in the United States, legislation was introduced in 1997 to permit physician-assisted suicide after a second referendum clearly endorsed the proposed legislation. Later in 1997, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide; however, the Court did not preclude individual states from legislating in favor of physician-assisted suicide. The Oregon legislation has, in consequence, remained operative and has been successfully utilised by a number of people. In November 2000, The Netherlands passed legislation to legalize the practice of voluntary euthanasia. The legislation passed through all the parliamentary stages early in 2001 and so became law. The Belgian parliament passed similar legislation in May 2002. (For a very helpful comparative study of relevant legislation see Lewis, 2007.)

With that brief sketch of the historical background in place, we now proceed to set out the conditions that those who have advocated making voluntary euthanasia legally permissible have wished to insist should be satisfied. The conditions are stated with some care so as to give focus to the moral debate about legalization. Second, we shall go on to outline the positive moral case underpinning the push to make voluntary euthanasia legally permissible. Third, we shall then consider the more important of the morally grounded objections that have been advanced by those opposed to the legalization of voluntary euthanasia.2. Five Individually Necessary Conditions for Candidacy for Voluntary Euthanasia

Advocates of voluntary euthanasia contend that if a person

(a) is suffering from a terminal illness;

(b) is unlikely to benefit from the discovery of a cure for that illness during what remains of her life expectancy;

(c) is, as a direct result of the illness, either suffering intolerable pain, or only has available a life that is unacceptably burdensome (because the illness has to be treated in ways that lead to her being unacceptably dependent on others or on technological means of life support);

(d) has an enduring, voluntary and competent wish to die (or has, prior to losing the competence to do so, expressed a wish to die in the event that conditions (a)-(c) are satisfied); and

(e) is unable without assistance to commit suicide,

then there should be legal and medical provision to enable her to be allowed to die or assisted to die.

It should be acknowledged that these conditions are quite restrictive, indeed more restrictive than some would think appropriate. In particular, the conditions concern access to voluntary euthanasia only for those who are terminally ill. While that expression is not free of all ambiguity, for present purposes it can be agreed that it does not include the bringing about of the death of, say, victims of accidents who are rendered quadriplegic or victims of early Alzheimer's Disease. Those who consider that such cases show the first condition to be too restrictive may nonetheless accept that including them would, at least for the time being, make it far harder to obtain legal protection for helping those terminally ill persons who wish to die. The fifth condition further restricts access to voluntary euthanasia by excluding those capable of ending their own lives, and so will not only be thought unduly restrictive by those who think physician-assisted suicide a better course to follow, but will be considered morally much harder to justify by those who think health care practitioners may never justifiably kill their patients. More on this anon.

The second condition is intended simply to reflect the fact that it is normally possible to say when someone's health status is incurable. So-called ‘miracle’ cures may be spoken of by sensationalist journalists, but progress toward medical breakthroughs is typically painstaking. If there are miracles wrought by God that will be quite another matter entirely, but it is at least clear that not everyone's death is thus to be staved off.

The third condition recognises what many who oppose the legalization of voluntary euthanasia do not, namely, that it is not only release from pain that leads people to want to be helped to die. In The Netherlands, for example, it has been found to be a less significant reason for requesting assistance with dying than other forms of suffering and frustration with loss of independence. Sufferers from some terminal conditions may have their pain relieved but have to endure side effects that for them make life unbearable. Others may not have to cope with pain but instead be incapable, as with motor neurone disease, of living without forms of life support that simultaneously rob their lives of quality.

A final preliminary point is that the fourth condition requires that the choice to die not only be voluntary but that it be made in an enduring (not merely a one-off) way and be competent. The choice is one that will require discussion and time for reflection and so should not be settled in a moment. As in other decisions affecting matters of importance, normal adults are presumed to choose voluntarily unless the presence of defeating considerations can be established. The burden of proof of establishing lack of voluntariness or lack of competence is on those who refuse to accept the person's choice. There is no need to deny that this burden can sometimes be met (e.g. by pointing to the person's being in a state of clinical depression). The claim is only that the onus falls on those who assert that a normal adult's choice is not competent.3. A Moral Case for Voluntary Euthanasia

The central ethical argument for voluntary euthanasia — that respect for persons demands respect for their autonomous choices as long as those choices do not result in harm to others — is directly connected with this issue of competence (cp. Brock, 1992) because autonomy presupposes competence. People have an interest in making important decisions about their lives in accordance with their own conception of how they want their lives to go. In exercising autonomy or self-determination, people take responsibility for their lives; since dying is a part of life, choices about the manner of their dying and the timing of their death are, for many people, part of what is involved in taking responsibility for their lives. Many people are concerned about what the last phase of their lives will be like, not merely because of fears that their dying might involve them in great suffering, but also because of the desire to retain their dignity and as much control over their lives as possible during this phase.

The technological interventions of modern medicine have had the effect of stretching out the time it takes for many people to die. Sometimes the added life this brings is an occasion for rejoicing; sometimes it drags out the period of significant physical and intellectual decline that a person undergoes in burdensome ways so that life becomes, to them, no longer worth living. There is no single, objectively correct answer as to when, if at all, life becomes a burden and unwanted. But that simply points up the importance of individuals being able to decide autonomously for themselves whether their own lives retain sufficient quality and dignity to make life worth living. Given that a critically ill person is typically in a severely compromised and debilitated state, it is, other things being equal, the patient's own judgement of whether continued life is a benefit that must carry the greatest weight, provided always that the patient is competent.

Suppose it is agreed that we should respect the autonomous choices of other people. If medical assistance is to be provided to help a person achieve her autonomously chosen goal of an easeful death (because she cannot end her own life), the autonomy of any professional who lends assistance also has to be respected. The value (or right) of self-determination does not entitle a patient to compel a medical professional to act contrary to her own moral or professional values. Hence, if voluntary euthanasia is to be legally permitted, it must be against a backdrop of respect for professional autonomy. Similarly, if a doctor's view of her moral or professional responsibilities is at odds with her patient's request for euthanasia, provision must be made for the transfer of the patient to the care of a doctor who faces no such conflict.

Opponents of voluntary euthanasia have endeavoured to counter this very straightforward moral case for the practice in a variety of ways (see, for example, Keown, 2002 and Foley .et al., 2002). Some of the counter-arguments are concerned only with whether the moral case warrants making the practice of voluntary euthanasia legal, others are concerned with trying to undermine the moral case itself. In what follows, consideration will be given to the six most important of the counter-arguments. (For more comprehensive discussions of the ethics of medically assisted death see Keown, 2002; Biggar, 2004; and Young, 2007.)4. Five Objections to the Moral Permissibility of Voluntary EuthanasiaObjection 1

It is often said that it is not necessary nowadays for anyone to die while suffering from intolerable or overwhelming pain. We are getting better at providing effective palliative care, and hospice care is more widely available. Given these considerations, some have urged that voluntary euthanasia is unnecessary.

There are several flaws in this counter-argument. First, while both good palliative care and hospice care make important contributions to the care of the dying, neither is a panacea. To get the best palliative care for an individual involves trial and error, with some consequent suffering in the process. Far more importantly, even high quality palliative care commonly exacts a price in the form of side effects such as nausea, incontinence, loss of awareness because of semi-permanent drowsiness, and so on. A rosy picture is often painted as to how palliative care can transform the plight of the dying. Such a picture is misleading according to those who have closely observed the effect of extended courses of treatment with drugs such as morphine, a point acknowledged by many skilled palliative care specialists. Second, though the sort of care provided through hospices is to be applauded, it is care that is available to only a small proportion of the terminally ill and then usually only in the very last stages of the illness (typically a matter of a few weeks). Third, and of greatest significance, not everyone wishes to avail themselves of palliative or hospice care. For those who prefer to die on their own terms and in their own time, neither option may be attractive. For many dying patients, the major source of distress is having their autonomous wishes frustrated. Fourth, as indicated earlier, the suffering that occasions a wish to end life is not always due to the pain occasioned by illness. For some, what is intolerable is their dependence on others or on machinery; for these patients, the availability of effective pain control will be quite irrelevant.Objection 2

A second, related objection to permitting the legalization of voluntary euthanasia argues that we can never have sufficient evidence to be justified in believing that a dying person's request to be helped to die is competent, enduring and genuinely voluntary.

It is certainly true that a request to die may not reflect an enduring desire to die (just as some attempts to commit suicide may reflect temporary despair). That is why advocates of voluntary euthanasia have argued that normally a cooling off period should be required before euthanasia is permitted. That having been said, to claim that we can never be justified in believing someone's request to die reflects a settled preference for death goes too far. If someone discusses the issue with others on different occasions, or reflects on the issue over an extended period, and does not waver in her conviction, her wish to die surely must be counted as enduring.

But, it might be said, what if a person is racked with pain, or mentally confused because of the measures taken to relieve her pain, and so not able to think clearly and rationally about the alternatives? It has to be agreed that a person in those circumstances who wants to die should not be assumed to have a competent, enduring and genuinely voluntary desire to die. However, there are at least two important points to make about those in such circumstances. First, they do not account for all of the terminally ill, so even if it is acknowledged that such people are incapable of agreeing to voluntary euthanasia that does not show that no one can ever voluntarily request help to die. Second, it is possible for a person to indicate, in advance of losing the capacity to give competent, enduring and voluntary consent, how she would wish to be treated should she become terminally ill and suffer intolerable pain or loss of control over her life. ‘Living wills’ or ‘advance declarations’ are legally useful instruments for giving voice to people's wishes while they are capable of giving competent, enduring and voluntary consent, including to their wanting help to die. As long as they are easily revocable in the event of a change of mind (just as ordinary wills are), they should be respected as evidence of a well thought out conviction. It should be noted, though, that any request for voluntary euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide will not at present be able lawfully to be implemented outside of The Netherlands, Belgium and Oregon.

Perhaps, though, what is really at issue in this objection is whether anyone can ever form a competent, enduring and voluntary wish about being better off dead, rather than continuing to suffer from an illness, without having yet suffered the illness. If this is what underlies the objection, though, it is surely too paternalistic to be acceptable. Why is it not possible for a person to have sufficient inductive evidence (e.g. based on the experience of the deaths of friends or family) to know her own mind and act accordingly?Objection 3

According to one interpretation of the traditional ‘doctrine of double effect’ it is permissible to act in ways which it is foreseen will have bad consequences, provided only that

(a) this occurs as a side effect (or, indirectly) to the achievement of the act that is directly aimed at;

(b) the act directly aimed at is itself morally good or, at least, morally neutral;

(c) the good effect is not achieved by way of the bad, that is, the bad must not be a means to the good; and

(d) the bad consequences must not be so serious as to outweigh the good effect.

According to the doctrine of double effect, it is, for example, permissible to alleviate pain by administering drugs such as morphine, knowing that doing so will shorten life, but impermissible to give an overdose or injection with the direct intention of terminating a patient's life (whether at her request or not). This is not the appropriate forum to give full consideration to this doctrine. However, there is one vital criticism to be made of the doctrine concerning its relevance to the issue of voluntary euthanasia.

On one plausible reading, the doctrine of double effect can be relevant only where a person's death is an evil or, to put it another way, a harm. Sometimes the notion of ‘harm’ is understood simply as damage to a person's interest whether consented to or not. At other times, it is understood, more strictly, as damage that has been wrongfully inflicted. On either account, if the death of a person who wishes to die is not harmful (because from that person's standpoint it is, in fact, beneficial), the doctrine of double effect can have no relevance to the debate about the permissibility of voluntary euthanasia. (For an extended discussion of the doctrine of double effect and its bearing on the moral permissibility of voluntary euthanasia see McIntyre, 2001.)Objection 4

There is a widespread belief that passive (voluntary) euthanasia, in which life-sustaining or life-prolonging measures are withdrawn or withheld, is morally acceptable because steps are simply not taken which could preserve or prolong life (and so a patient is allowed to die), whereas active (voluntary) euthanasia is not, because it requires an act of killing. The distinction, despite its widespread popularity, is very unclear. (For a fuller, and very helpful, discussion, see McMahan, 2002.) Whether behaviour is described in terms of acts or omissions (a distinction which underpins the alleged difference between active and passive voluntary euthanasia), is generally a matter of pragmatics rather than anything of deeper importance. Consider, for instance, the practice (once common in hospitals) of deliberately proceeding slowly to a ward in response to a request to provide assistance for a patient subject to a ‘not for resuscitation’ code. Or consider ‘pulling the plug’ on an oxygen machine keeping an otherwise dying patient alive as against not replacing the tank when it runs out. Are these acts or omissions; are these cases of passive euthanasia or active euthanasia?

Further, the distinction between killing and letting die is unclear. Consider the case of a patient suffering from motor neurone disease who is completely respirator dependent, finds her condition intolerable, and competently and persistently requests to be removed from the respirator so that she may die. Even the Catholic Church in recent times has been prepared to agree that it is permissible, in cases like this, to turn off the respirator. But it seems odd to think that a case like this is best described as one in which the patient is allowed to die.

In rejoinder, it is sometimes said that the difference is found in the provider's intention: if someone's life is intentionally terminated she has been killed, whereas if she is no longer being aggressively treated, we can attribute her death to the underlying disease. But this is often implausible. In many cases, the most plausible interpretation of the physician's intention in withdrawing life-sustaining measures is to end the person's life. Consider the growing practice of withholding artificial nutrition and hydration when a decision has been made to cease aggressive treatment, and then see if we can generalise to cases like those of motor neurone sufferers (cf. Winkler, 1995). Many physicians would say that their intention in withholding life-sustaining artificial nutrition is simply to respect the patient's wishes. This is plausible in those instances where the patient is still able competently to ask that such treatment no longer be given (or the patient's proxy makes the request); in the absence of such a request, though, the best explanation of the physician's behaviour seems to be that the physician intends thereby to end the life of the patient. Permanently withdrawing nutrition from someone in, say, a persistent vegetative state, does not seem merely to be a matter of foreseeing that death will ensue, but, rather, one of intending their death. What could be the point of the action, the goal aimed at, the intended outcome, if not to end the patient's life? No sense can be made of the action as being intended to serve to palliate the disease, or to keep the patient comfortable, or even, in the case of a person in a permanently vegetative state, of allowing the underlying disease to carry the person off. The loss of brain activity is not going to kill the person: what is going to kill the patient is the act of starving her to death.

Similarly, giving massive doses of morphine far beyond what is needed to control pain, or removing a respirator from a sufferer from motor neurone disease would seem, by parallel reasoning, to amount to the intentional bringing about of the death of the person being cared for. To be sure, there are circumstances in which doctors can truthfully say that the actions they perform, or omissions they make, lead to the deaths of their patients without them intending that those patients should die. If, for instance, a patient refuses life-prolonging medical treatment because she considers it useless, it might reasonably be said that the doctor's intention in complying is simply to respect the patient's wishes. The point is that there are many other circumstances in which it seems highly stilted to claim, as some doctors do, that the intention is anything other than the intention to bring about death — and hence, by an intention-based definition of killing, that the acts and ommissions in question count as killings.

This itself is a problem only if killing, in medical contexts, is always morally unjustified — a premise that underwrites much of the debate surrounding this fourth objection. But this underlying assumption is open to challenge (and has been challenged in e.g. Rachels, 1986, chs. 7, 8; Kuhse, 1987). For one thing, there may well be cases in which killing, where requested, is morally better than allowing a death — namely, where the latter would serve only to prolong the person's suffering. Further, despite the longstanding legal doctrine that no one can justifiably consent to be killed (on which more later), it surely is relevant to the justification of an act of killing that the person killed has autonomously decided that he would be better off dead.Objection 5

It is often said that if society allows voluntary euthanasia to be legally permitted, then we will have set foot on a slippery slope that will lead us to support other forms of euthanasia, including non-voluntary euthanasia. Whereas it was once the common refrain that that was precisely what happened in Hitler's Germany, in recent decades the tendency has been to claim that experience in The Netherlands has confirmed the reality of the slippery slope. Slippery slope arguments come in various versions. One (but not the only) way of classifying them has been to refer to logical, psychological and arbitrary line versions. The common feature of the different forms is the contention that once the first step is taken on a slippery slope the subsequent steps follow inexorably, whether for logical reasons, psychological reasons, or to avoid arbitrariness in ‘drawing a line’ between a person's actions. (For further discussion see e.g. Rachels, 1986, ch. 10; Brock, 1992, pp. 19ff; Walton, 1992).

We first consider why, at the theoretical level, none of these forms of argument appears powerful enough to trouble an advocate of the legalization of voluntary euthanasia. We then comment on the alleged empirical support from the experiences of Hitler's Germany and The Netherlands of today for the existence of a slippery slope beginning from the legalization of voluntary euthanasia.

There is nothing logically inconsistent in supporting voluntary euthanasia while rejecting non-voluntary euthanasia as morally inappropriate. Some advocates of voluntary euthanasia, to be sure, will wish also to lend their support to some acts of non-voluntary euthanasia (e.g. for those in persistent vegetative states who have never indicated their wishes about being helped to die, or for certain severely disabled infants for whom the outlook is hopeless). Others will think that what may be done with the consent of the patient sets a strict limit on the practice of euthanasia. The difference is not one of logical acumen; it has to be located in the respective values of the different supporters (e.g. whether a person's self-determination or her best interests should prevail).

It is also difficult to see the alleged psychological inevitability of moving from voluntary to non-voluntary euthanasia. Why should it be supposed that those who value the autonomy of the individual and so support provision for voluntary euthanasia will, as a result, find it psychologically easier to kill patients who are not able competently to request assistance with dying? What reason is there to believe that they will, as a result of their support for voluntary euthanasia, be psychologically driven to practise non-voluntary euthanasia?

Finally, since there is nothing arbitrary about distinguishing voluntary euthanasia from non-voluntary euthanasia (because the line between them is based on clear principles), there can be no substance to the charge that only by arbitrarily drawing a line between them could non-voluntary euthanasia be avoided once voluntary euthanasia was legalized.

What, though, of Hitler's Germany and The Netherlands of today? The former is easily dismissed as an indication of an inevitable descent from voluntary euthanasia to non-voluntary. There never was a policy in favor of, or a legal practice of, voluntary euthanasia in Germany in the 1920s to the 1940s (see, for example, Burleigh, 1994). There was, prior to Hitler coming to power, a clear practice of killing some disabled persons; but the justification was never suggested to be that their being killed was in their best interests; rather, it was said that society would be benefited. Hitler's later revival of the practice and its widening to take in other groups such as Jews and gypsies was part of a program of eugenics, not euthanasia.

Since the publication of the Remmelink Report in 1991 into the medical practice of euthanasia in The Netherlands, it has frequently been said that the Dutch experience shows that legally protecting voluntary euthanasia is impossible without also affording protection to the non-voluntary euthanasia that will come in its train. Serious studies carried out by van der Maas, et al., 1991, and van der Wal, et al., 1992a and 1992b, seem to indicate, though, that the worry is unfounded; more recently, a second nation-wide investigation of physician-assisted dying in the Netherlands carried out in 1995 found no evidence of a descent down a slippery slope toward ignoring people's voluntary choices to be assisted to die (see van der Maas, et al., 1996; van der Wal, et al., 1996; Griffiths, et al., 1998). A third study, which confirmed the earlier results, was reported in 2003 (see Onwuteaka-Philipsen, et al., 2003). More specifically, of those terminally ill persons assisted to die (initially under the agreement between the legal and medical authorities and subsequently under legislation), a little over one-half were clearly cases of voluntary euthanasia as it has been characterised in this article; of the remainder, the vast majority of cases were of patients who at the time of the assisted death were no longer competent. For the overwhelming majority of the latter group, the decision to end life was taken only after consultation between the doctor(s) and family members; further, according to the researchers, most of the cases should be seen as fitting the practice, common in other countries where voluntary euthanasia is not legally tolerated, of giving large doses of opioids to relieve pain in the knowledge that this will also end life. It is true that in a very few cases, there was consultation only with other medical personnel, rather than with relatives; the researchers point out that this was due to the fact that families in The Netherlands strictly have no final authority to act as surrogate decision-makers for incompetent persons.

That there have only been a handful of prosecutions of Dutch doctors for failing to follow agreed procedures (Griffiths, et al., 1998), that none of the doctors prosecuted has had a significant penalty imposed, and that the Dutch public have regularly reaffirmed their support for those agreed procedures suggests that, contrary to the claims of some critics, the legalization of voluntary euthanasia has not increased the incidence of non-voluntary euthanasia. Indeed, such studies as have been published about what happens in other countries, like Australia (see Kuhse, et al., 1997), where no legal protection is in place, suggest that the pattern in The Netherlands and elsewhere is quite similar. Some have argued, further, that there may be more danger of the line between voluntary and non-voluntary euthanasia being blurred if euthanasia is practised in the absence of legal recognition, since there will be no transparency or monitoring.

None of this is to suggest that there is no need to put in place safeguards against potential abuse of legally protected voluntary euthanasia. This is particularly important for those who have become incompetent by the time decisions need to be taken about whether to assist them to die. Further, it is, of course, possible that the reform of any law may have unintended effects. However, if the arguments given above are sound (and the Dutch experience, along with the more limited experience in the State of Oregon and in Belgium, is not only the best evidence we have that they are sound, but the only relevant evidence), that does not seem very likely.

Moreover, it is plausible to think that the fundamental basis of the right to decide about life-sustaining treatment -- respect for a person's autonomy — has direct relevance to voluntary euthanasia as well. Extending the right of self-determination to cover cases of voluntary euthanasia would not, therefore, amount to a dramatic shift in legal policy. No novel legal values or principles need to be invoked. Indeed, the fact that suicide and attempted suicide are no longer criminal offences in many jurisdictions indicates that the central importance of individual self-determination in a closely analogous setting has been accepted. The fact that assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia have not yet been widely decriminalised is perhaps best explained along the lines that have frequently been offered for excluding consent of the victim as a justification for an act of killing, namely the difficulties thought to exist in establishing the genuineness of the consent. But, the establishment of suitable procedures for giving consent to assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia would seem to be no harder than establishing procedures for competently refusing burdensome or otherwise unwanted medical treatment. The latter has already been accomplished in many jurisdictions, so the former should be achievable as well.

Suppose that the moral case for legalizing voluntary euthanasia does come to be judged as stronger than the case against legalization and voluntary euthanasia is made legally permissible. Should doctors take part in the practice? Should only doctors perform voluntary euthanasia? The proper administration of medical care is not at odds with an understanding of it that both promotes patients' welfare interests and respects their self-determination. It is these twin values that should guide medical care, not a commitment to preserving life at all costs, or preserving life without regard to whether patients want their lives prolonged when they judge that life is no longer of benefit or value to themselves. Many doctors in The Netherlands and, to judge from available survey evidence, in other Western countries as well, see the practice of voluntary euthanasia as not only compatible with their professional commitments but also with their conception of the best medical care for the dying. That being so, they should not be prohibited by law from lending their professional assistance to those competent, terminally ill persons for whom no cure is possible and who wish for an easy death.BibliographyBiggar, N., 2004, Aiming to Kill: The Ethics of Suicide and Euthanasia, London: Darton, Longman and Todd.Brock, D., 1993, “Voluntary Active Euthanasia”, Hastings Center Report, 22/2: 10-22.Burleigh, M., 1994, Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany c. 1900-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Commission on the Study of Medical Practice Concerning Euthanasia: Medical Decisions Concerning the End of Life, The Hague: SdU, 1991. (This is known as ‘The Remmelink Report’.)Foley, K. and H. Hendin, (eds.), 2002, The Case Against Assisted Suicide: For the Right to End-of-Life Care, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Griffiths, J., A. Bood, and H. Weyers, 1998, Euthanasia and Law in The Netherlands, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Keown, J., 2002, Euthanasia, ethics and public policy: an argument against legalization, New York: Cambridge University Press.Kuhse, H., 1987, The Sanctity-of-Life Doctrine in Medicine: A Critique, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Kuhse, H., P. Singer, P. Baume, A. Clark, and M. Rickard, 1997, “End-of-Life Decisions in Australian Medical Practice”, The Medical Journal of Australia, 166: 191-196.Lewis, P., 2007, Assisted Dying and Legal Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press.McIntyre, A., 2001, “Doing Away With Double Effect”, Ethics, 111: 219-255.McMahan, J., 2002, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life, New York: Oxford University Press.Onwuteaka-Philipsen, B.D., A. van der Heide, D. Koper, I. Keij-Deerenberg, J.A.C. Rietjens, M.L. Rurup, A.M. Vrakking, J.J. Georges, M.T. Muller, G. van der Wal and P.J. van der Maas, 2003, “Euthanasia and Other End-of-Life Decisions in The Netherlands in 1990, 1995 and 2001”, The Lancet, 362: 395-399.Rachels, J., 1986, The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.van der Maas, P.J., J.J.M. van Delden, L. Pijnenborg, C.W.N. Looman, 1991, “Euthanasia and other Medical Decisions Concerning the End of Life”, The Lancet, 338: 669-674.van der Maas, P.J., G. van der Wal, I. Haverkate, C.L.M. de Graaf, J.G.C. Kester, B.D. Onwuteaka-Philipsen, A. van der Heide, J.M. Bosma and D.L. Willems, 1996, “Euthanasia, Physician-Assisted Suicide, and other Medical Practices Involving the End of Life in the Netherlands, 1990-1995”, The New England Journal of Medicine, 335: 1699-1705.van der Wal, G., J.Th.M. van Eijk, H.J.J. Leenen, C. Spreeuwenberg, 1992a, “Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, I: How Often is it Practised by Family Doctors in the Netherlands?”, Family Practice, 9: 130-134.van der Wal, G., J.Th.M. van Eijk, H.J.J. Leenen, C. Spreeuwenberg, 1992b, “Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, II: Do Dutch Family Doctors Act Prudently?”, Family Practice, 9: 135-140.van der Wal, G., P.J. van der Maas, J.M. Bosma, B.D. Onwuteaka-Philipsen, D.L. Willems, I. Haverkate and P.J. Kostense, 1996, “Evaluation of the Notification Procedure for Physician-Assisted Death in the Netherlands”, The New England Journal of Medicine, 335: 1706-1711.Winkler, E., 1995, “Reflections on the State of Current Debate Over Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia”, Bioethics, 9: 313-326.Young, R., 2007, Medically Assisted Death, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Other Internet ResourcesEuthanasia and Assisted Suicide: Seven Reasons Why They Should Not Be Legalized, authored by Luke Gormally (Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics)Voluntary Euthanasia Society of the NetherlandsEuthanasia and End-of-Life Decisions (Ethics Updates, L. Hinman, University of San Diego)

Another prominent scientist has thrown his weight behind the long term agenda to implement measures to stem the population of the planet, a view that is gaining ground with increased pressure on governments to act over climate change as the justification.

The Medical Journal of Australia has published a report by a professor who suggests that couples with more than two children should be charged a lifelong tax to offset their extra offspring's carbon dioxide emissions.

The report in an Australian medical journal called for parents to be charged $5000 a head for every child after their second, and an annual tax of up to $800, reports the AAP.

And couples who were sterilised would be eligible for carbon credits under the controversial proposal.

The report, written by Perth specialist Professor Barry Walters, also suggests that the government should introduce a "baby levy" in the form of a carbon tax in line with the "polluter pays" principle.

The proposals smack of Communist China's one child policy and present a nightmare scenario of authoritarian governmental control. Under such legislation the government would essentially have the power to force people to stop re-producing.

You may think such views are extreme and representative of a small minority, and you'd be right. The problem however is that this minority are the ones in power.

Similar views have been espoused by UN agencies such as the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), WHO and UNICEF and international NGO's such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation, as well as The US Government for decades.

We have previously documented the elite's hideous interest in depopulation techniques, an interest that mirrors the nightmare eugenics visions of Nazi scientists in the 1940s.

Calls to begin sterilizing the human population have previously been put forward by former secretary of State and high ranking Bilderberger Henry Kissinger in a declassified document of the National Security Council (1974) entitled "The Implications of World-wide Population Growth on the Security and External Interests of the United States".

This document lists, as a priority, birth-rate control in 13 key countries in the Third World, especially in South America. Extraordinary resources were allotted to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to implement the policy of birth-rate control.

The memorandum basically stresses the need to offer increased aid for third world countries that agree to implement programs of sterilization and depopulation.

Concentration on Education and Indoctrination of The Rising Generation of Children Regarding the Desirability of Smaller Family Size

Utilization of Mass Media and Satellite Communications Systems for Family Planning

The memorandum also includes a section that lauds abortion and states that " -- It would be unwise to restrict abortion research for the following reasons: 1) The persistent and ubiquitous nature of abortion. 2) Widespread lack of safe abortion techniques..."

The document contains many more hideous passages, read it for yourself by clicking here.

Kissinger also prepared a depopulation manifesto for President Jimmy Carter called 'Global 2000' which detailed using food as a weapon to depopulate the third world.

The United Nations Population Fund directly supports policies such as that of the "one child policy" in Communist China which encapsulates coercive and enforced abortion.

In 2002 Secretary of State Colin Powell stated in a letter to Congress:

"Regrettably, the People's Republic of China has in place a regime of severe penalties on women who have unapproved births. This regime plainly operates to coerce pregnant women to have abortions in order to avoid the penalties and therefore amounts to a ‘program of coercive abortion.’ Regardless of the modest size of UNFPA’s budget in China or any benefits its programs provide, UNFPA's support of, and involvement in, China's population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion.”

Yet The UNPFA seem to think this is a great thing:

"China has had the most successful family planning policy in the history of mankind in terms of quantity and with that, China has done mankind a favour," United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) representative Sven Burmester said last week. —10/11/99 Agence France-Presse

Under the Reagan Administration legislation sponsored by then-Rep. Jack Kemp (NY) and then-Sen. Bob Kasten (WI) ensured funding to the UNPFA was cut off for these very reasons. Yet is was no surprise when In 1993, the Clinton Administration dramatically revised the official interpretation of the “Kemp-Kasten amendment” in order to facilitate U.S. funding of UNFPA, thus making available $14.5 million.

In May 2003, the House Committee on International Relations narrowly adopted an an amendment by Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY) revoking the ban on such participation with the UNPFA. The amendment earmarked $100 million for UNFPA over the next two years.

Such calls to depopulate are echoed within the western scientific community by prominent figures such as Dr. Eric R. Pianka, who travels around the US speaking of the need to exterminate 90% of the population in order to save the planet. He suggests using the airborne ebola virus to do the job, choosing it over AIDS because of its faster kill period. Ebola victims suffer the most tortuous deaths imaginable as the virus kills by liquefying the internal organs. The body literally dissolves as the victim writhes in pain bleeding from every orifice.

Pianka is always keen to stress that his views are not race specific and that he wants to see 90% of all races exterminated. He is quoted as saying "We need to sterilize everybody on the earth and make the antidote freely available to anyone willing to work for it".

Pianka was presented with a distinguished scientist award by the Texas Academy of Science in 2006. Pianka is no crackpot. He has given lectures to prestigious universities worldwide. His chilling comments, and their often enthusiastic reception, again underscore the elite's agenda to enact horrifying measures of population control.

Dr Pianka's comments are merely echoes of the elite lust for a Malthusian social Darwinist control mechanism. They wish to use the excuse of having to "save the earth" in order to take away freedom and implement a massive authoritarian control grid.

These views have also been famously perpetuated by control freaks such as Ted Turner, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Prince Philip.

"The simplest answer is that the world's population should be about two billion, and we've got about six billion now," Turner told E Magazine, an environmentalist publication. Turner went even further in an interview with Audubon magazine, stating that "A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."

In a 1991 interview with the UNESCO Courier, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the famous Emmy award winning film producer who went on to be a kingpin of the environmental movement said, "It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day."

That works out to 127,750,000 people per year, and 1.27 billion people over 10 years.

In the foreword to his 1986 book If I Were an Animal, Prince Philip wrote, "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."

The elite are very concerned about their noble effort to cull the population for the "greater good". Throughout history elites have invented justification for barbaric practices as a cover for their true agenda of absolute power and control over populations. Up until the 19th century, the transatlantic slave trade was justified by saying that the practice was biblical and therefore morally redeemable in nature, despite the fact that no such bible passage exists.

Today the control mechanism is the continued perpetuation of the myth that humanity is killing the planet. Elite organisations such as the Bilderberg Group, CFR, Trilateral Commission, and their think tanks like the Club of Rome are engaged in selling this myth to the masses.

In a report titled The First Global Revolution (1991) published by the Club of Rome, a globalist think tank whose members have included Kissinger, David Rockefeller and Al Gore, we find the following statement:

"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."

In the past, the Club of Rome has resorted to deceptive tactics in order to support their plans. In 1972, the Club of Rome, along with an MIT team released a report called Limits to growth. The report stated that we were to reach an environmental holocaust by the year 2000 due to overpopulation and other environmental problems. Support for their conclusions was gathered by results from a computer model. Aurelio Peccei, one of the founders of the Club of Rome, later confessed that the computer program had been written to give the desired results.

Why is this so concerning? Because groups such as the Club of Rome are contracted out by our own governments and the UN to prepare ‘Policy Guidance Documents’ which they use in formulating their policies and programs. How come the Club of Rome gets the gig? Simply because many high ranking UN and government officials are also CoR members, or have direct corporate ties to members. The same goes for the CFR and the Trilateral Commission.

A recently unearthed documentary that sought to expose this agenda at its inception is George Hunt's excellent research piece on the environmental movement.

Alex Jones' latest documentary, Endgame breaks new ground by succinctly tying the hijacking of the environmental movement with the depopulation agenda. The film outlines how the scientific rationale for tyranny gives the elite an excuse for treating their fellow man like lab rats and how this mindset gave rise to the emergence of eugenics in the 19th century. Endgame catalogues how the Malthusian drive to eliminate the poor developed into social Darwinism which then transgressed into the fields of racial hygiene programs and genetic screening as American citizens were forcibly sterilized by the state throughout the 19th century.

Endgame also charts how the Rockefeller family exported eugenics to Germany by bankrolling the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute which later would form a central pillar in the Third Reich's ideology of the Nazi super race. After the fall of the Nazis, top eugenicists were protected by the allies as the victorious parties fought over who would enjoy their "expertise" in the post-war world.

The comments of elitists alive today who openly advocate "culling" the human population by means of mass genocide, plagues and viruses are also considered alongside Aldous Huxley's warning that ruling oligarchies would use advanced techniques of medicine and pharmacology to ensure the human population "enjoy their servitude".

Endgame rips wide open how the myth of man-made global warming is being hyped by the establishment in order to create new feudalist control methods and convince people that their every action should be regulated by the state in the interests of supposedly saving the planet, while the real environmental crises go ignored.

The doomsday warning of the population bomb consistently referred to as justification for depopulation is also complete pseudo-science. Populations in developed countries are declining and only in third world countries is it expanding dramatically. Industrialization itself levels out population trends and even despite this world population models routinely show that the earth's population will level out at 9 billion in 2050 and slowly decline after that. "The population of the most developed countries will remain virtually unchanged at 1.2 billion until 2050," states a United Nations report. The UN population policies seem to be in direct contradiction to THEIR OWN FINDINGS.

Conservation International's own study revealed that 46% of the earth's surface was an untouched wilderness, that is land areas not including sea. It is commonly accepted that the entire world population could all fit into North America and each have an acre of their own land.

Once a country industrializes there is an average of a 1.6 child rate per household, so the western world population is actually in decline. That trend has also been witnessed in areas of Asia like Japan and South Korea. The UN has stated that the population will peak at 9 billion and then begin declining.

Even if you buy into the propaganda that climate change is caused by man in the face of the facts, and then buy into the propaganda that there are too many people on the planet in the face of the facts, can you justify advocating state micro management of your life down to how many children you are allowed to have? Furthermore, can you justify programs of sterilization?

We are being bombarded daily with idiotic notions that the human race and life itself is a virus that has spread all over the planet and that we must consider stemming our own progression to counter it.

Meanwhile, as we ludicrously debate culling ourselves, real environmental problems are doing the job for us. Genetically modified garbage is poisoning our very food supply, chemical pollutants are flowing into our water supplies, the disappearance of huge swathes of the bee populations across the world is threatening crop production, deforestation, toxic waste dumping, the list goes on. All these real and important issues are being buried in a sea a frothing BS.

Every time the issue of climate change is raised we are told that the solution is more taxes and more extreme control over our lives. These things will not reverse the effects of climate change, which has been proven to be a thoroughly natural cycle of our planet since the dawn of time. Instead they will do everything to grease the skids for draconian taxation and control measures that will aid the construction of the prison planet that the elite have planned all along.